A lot of people just flat out didn’t believe it. Others called it a hoax, a PR stunt or just me being gullible.

All of this is good. It has helped to get at the truth by following up further with Bigpoint. And the truth, disappointingly, is that Bigpont may not have made €2 million from the 10th Drone.

The truth about Bigpoint’s 10th Drone

Let’s get some facts straight:

The 10th drone exists (you can see a picture of it above)

To buy the 10th Drone, you need to buy all the previous drones (the first, the second, the third and so on.)

If you tried to buy the 10th Drone without owning any other drones, it would cost you around €1,000

Bigpoint has sold 2,000 10th Drones in November 2011

This is where it starts to get messy. The 10th Drone isn’t available for cash. It is only available for the in-game currency Uridium. Uridium can be acquired by playing the game, or for real money. Bigpoint sometimes holds sales, which means that people can acquire Uridium at varying exchange rates to real money over the course of their involvement with the game..

So Bigpoint has sold 2,000 drones for Uridium that has an equivalent value of €1,000 if a player has not earned any Uridium nor bought Urididum at a discount in the past.

I suspect that Bigpoint doesn’t know exactly how much money it has made from the 10th Drone. And that’s OK. The company is customer-centric, not product-centric, and it is much more important to understand the lifetime value of a customer than to focus on how much profit a single virtual good has made.

But I no longer think that you can multiply 2,000 10th Drones sold x €1,000 to work out how much revenue Bigpoint made from this single item.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com

It was checked. It was confirmed. The key was phrases like “2,000 drones were sold”. Then some of the clarification was unclear.

Plus, as I’m sure you know, sometimes in order to get to the truth, you need to have the main story out there.

Guest

It is indeed good that you’ve clarified this. However, the facts that are listed here are things that could easily have been checked previously with just a little investigation. Slightly disappointed none was done before posting.

About

Gamesbrief is a blog about the business of games. We look behind the headlines to tell you not just what is happening to games, but why it matters to your business. From Activision to Zynga, we analyse the companies who are making waves in the games industry and the new platforms, like Facebook, iPhone and Unity, that are changing the market.

Testimonials

“GAMESbrief is an unending source of industry wisdom and intelligent comment. It offers a unique insight from an investment perspective, perceptive discussion of industry trends and reviews of quirky and innovative games that we need to know about.I very much recommend it.”Charles Cecil,Revolution Software